LONDON.- Twenty years ago, London born artist Sam Orlando Miller left the city for Italy. Away from the eyes of the world his first sculptural mirror emerged, informed by his knowledge of painting, his skills with three-dimensional form, and his fluency with light and reflection. Miller recently relocated his studio to the wilds of northern Spain, the landscape around him offering patterns and rhythms of making. Attuned to earth and place, he continues to translate his inner world into images and objects.
During his lifetime of making a personal language has emerged, an evolving lexicon of shapes and geometry. Working alone by hand and eye, Miller’s works invoke a pause, inviting us to linger beside their resonant forms. He creates contours that beckon us closer, throws light around us as we move, his art echoing ancestral trades with the freedom of a poet.
The works in this exhibition span the past ten years pivoting around an on-going theme of the ephemeral: an attempt, says Miller, to keep a connection to the ground itself.
Museo delle Lacrime del Sole / Museum of the Tears of The Sun (2022) offers containers to store secrets, and shelves to arrange our books. This latest version of his chequered museum series explores a spiral droplet theme. Mirror inlaid into the surface forms a patina of floating symbols. Objects are contained behind a shimmering façade.
The pendant mirror-strips of Cascata d’Acqua 2 x 48 x 3 / Waterfall 2 x 48 x 3 (2015) wait to signal the breeze. In this work Miller brings our attention to the fleetingness of reflection. Showers of lines are suspended, forming a partially solid mirror in which we glimpse fragments of ourselves.
Reassured by the paths of the planets, Miller contemplates the fragility of life beneath these predictable arcs. He creates for us a galaxy, a chandelier of tangible, illuminated forms. Fiore del Cielo / Flowers of The Sky (2022) explores the significance of light as shape and substance.
‘When I saw the works in this exhibition together for the first time, what I noticed was that they possessed a lightness, that they seemed almost half-evaporated, held together by a feeling of being transitory, yet at the same time each had a solid presence. It was as if the substance of the work was in question, and I became acutely aware of my own physical presence. And as I looked, I was reminded of those magical moments when we are suddenly brought back to ourselves, and we actually see ourselves clearly, like rain on dust.’
Words by Helen Miller
